


It Is Always Winter When Klaus Comes Home

by tiredperalta



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Ben is lovely, Canon Compliant, Diego is lovely, Drug Abuse, Everyone else not so much, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Recovery, Rehabilitation, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 08:01:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18406478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiredperalta/pseuds/tiredperalta
Summary: There begins a sort of ritual, every time Klaus leaves.It begins this way:A boy packs his bag with the intention of leaving once again.He walks into the nearest bathroom, washes his face in the sink with cold water. He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. He buries his nails into his pale skin. He stands back after a moment, takes a deep breath and inspects the red indents appearing on his skin.It finishes this way:The boy leaves the house via a bedroom window or a back door. On his way out, he sits on the ground in his garden. He lies back - more often than not in the snow that covers the ground - look up at the moon and then he disappears.





	It Is Always Winter When Klaus Comes Home

**Author's Note:**

> hello! thanks so much for reading this. the ua comics meant the world to me as a young teenager and the show has totally revitalised my love for it.  
> this is basically my way of saying im in love with klaus hargreeves okay bye  
> leave me a comment if u enjoy!

It is always winter when Klaus comes home.

He’s realized that whenever he arrives, he appears midst fleeting snow. The brisk wind brushes against his skin and disappears into the night, returning to the sky to tell the stars of the prodigal son’s return.

He never truly feels the cold. He only feels numb.

He leaves at regular intervals throughout his life due to a multitude of different reasons but when the air gets too cold and his body gets too sober, he returns home.

Sometimes, he arrives clutching a handful or drugs or a bottle of alcohol. Sometimes, he arrives owning nothing at all. He walks up the steps to the academy, pulls his jacket tighter around himself as he gets to the door. He announces his arrival - either in the form of a loud knock, a reluctant doorbell or a confident shout of _“It’s me!”_ as he lets himself inside.

(He loses the ability to do this the fourth time he leaves home. He is fourteen, fresh out of a rehabilitation programme for the first time and _terrified_ and he returns home to find his father has changed the locks.)

Sometimes, there is no one home when he returns. On such occasions, he creeps through the house until he finds his mother silently recharging in the hallway. Sufficiently certain she’s asleep, he begins to help himself to food from the kitchen and alcohol from the cupboard that he was once too short to reach. He stands in his old bedroom, meticulously undresses. He creeps into Ben’s room to steal his old iPod and runs himself a bath in the bathroom down the hall. He laces his hair with Vanya’s coconut shampoo and covers his skin with Allison’s vanilla body wash. He scrubs his skin of dirt and drugs and sweat and fear. He lights a cigarette, inhales smoke into his lungs and watches it disperse out into the air.

He lies there just long enough to slip in and out of unconsciousness as he smokes - but not long enough to fall prey to his thoughts. He climbs out of the bath just as the water begins to cool, wraps himself in a towel and traipses back to his room. Sometimes, he pulls on clothes he left at the academy years before or sometimes he raids Allison's old closet for something suitably warm and suitably familiar before collapsing into his too-small bed. He reaches over to the sockets by his bedside table, plugs in his fairy lights and sleeps amongst the warmth of blankets and security more often than not for the first time in a long time.

* * *

 

There are occasions when he arrives home and finds his house is busy - alive, even.

More often than not, Pogo greets him at the door. Pogo observes the way his scarred, bare arms have fought against both needles and the cold and hurries him inside with a stern _“Master Klaus!”_ He rushes off to find a blanket to thaw the frozen boy in front of him.

His mother finds him soon after. She envelops him in a hug, runs her hands through the curls atop his head. He’s shorter than her until he turns seventeen - he realizes he has to lean down to hug her, even despite the heels she always wears.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” she whispers.

(He feels guilty for a while after because he knows his mom lives for her children if for nothing else.)

* * *

 

Hidden amongst the rooms of his old home are his siblings, although he rarely sees the full set.

When he’s younger and he’s run away from home for a few weeks in an impulsive moment of fear or anger, he is more likely to return and find five or six of his brothers and sisters. He finds Allison and Luther under stairwells and in locked rooms, hoarding secrets that they know he won’t approve of. He rarely tells them he’s home and largely attempts to stay out of their way, rather than greet them and face the wrath of a sister who can change reality and a brother who could easily kill him.

He finds Diego throwing knives and following after mom. Number Two greets him happily every time without fail, hugs Klaus and mockingly tells him off for leaving.

(It’s a private joke between them, they both know as soon as Diego turns seventeen, he’ll leave this house and never return, much in the same way that Klaus keeps trying to.)

He used to see Ben and Five around the house but it’s been so long since they both disappeared that he doesn’t really remember them. He has vague memories of Five lecturing him on the dangers of alcohol poisoning and drug overdoses. He has even vaguer memories of Ben begging him not to leave or begging him to take him with him but Klaus isn’t sure if either of them even really happened.

He hears Vanya rather than sees her. He‘ll hear her violin hiding its haunting tune delicately amongst the pipes and foundations. On these odd occasions that he returns home and hears her music, he realizes he feels at peace dancing by himself in a way he never did when he claimed the house as his own.

The peace is ultimately shattered when his siblings realize he’s home and he is shouted back into the shadows amongst ghosts and blame and memories of Ben and Five and a past they’ve lost.

He’s since forgotten a lot of these memories - vague approximations of the past have long since replaced the solid frameworks of the reality he once knew. He thinks Vanya might have played the violin, but she may have played the cello. He thinks he may have walked in on Allison and Luther kissing, but he may have just made that up. He may have seen Diego practicing how to speak in front of a mirror, but he may have just been high. He doesn’t really know anymore.

* * *

 

When he’s older and more accustomed to leaving home and not returning for months on end, Klaus realizes that he sees his siblings less and less.

Luther is on the moon - or possibly on a mission, Klaus doesn’t really care.

Diego has left home and is training to be a cop or a vigilante - he flicks between both these days.

Allison is with her husband, with her _child._

Five is still missing.

Ben is still dead.

Vanya is somewhere screaming his secrets at pages as they wait to become a book.

 _Fucking hell,_ he thinks, _that book._

He knew she was writing it because she called him, crying and apologizing, for the first time ever at 2 am one night and he’s so high he barely even recognizes that it’s her speaking. She promises that everything she was writing wasn’t done to hurt him. She promises that she’s writing because she has to in order to move on. She promises that she loves him. She promises that Five and Klaus were the only siblings she ever _truly_ loved.

This love apparently doesn’t stop her from telling the world every one of his secrets. It doesn’t stop her writing of his drug abuse, his meaningless flings, his suicide attempts, his constant running away from home ever since he was ten. She tells the world of his supposed “cruel” nature as a teenager when he couldn’t tell the difference between drugs and reality, between right and wrong. She tells the world of the “trail of unmatched destruction” he leaves wherever he goes.

For a while, he hates her. That is until he does one too many lines of cocaine and forgets everything he ever knew for just long enough to feel numb. He calls her and she doesn’t pick up but he leaves a voicemail and tells her it’s okay, he understands, he forgives her.

(It’s not much, but he hopes it eases some of the pain she feels.)

* * *

 

There are only two constants amongst his yearly returns: his father and the snow.

His father always neglects to validate Klaus’s arrival with a greeting. Time after time, Klaus returns home after running away and his father ignores him, knowing that every time he leaves, Klaus will always come back.

A prime example of this arrives the fourth time Klaus runs away and returns, his drug habit having only recently been discovered.

He’s greeted by his siblings but it’s his mom he missed the most. He follows silently after his mom as she walks into his father's office. He secretly stands by the door, listening.

“Klaus is back,” his mother says.

“Who?”

“Klaus. Number Four.”

His father remains silent, pouring over his books and notes. He doesn’t look up. He just nods.

“And how long will he be staying this time?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” his mother will say as her smile falters, “we should make the most of the time we have him for.”

“He should not be using my house as a hotel in between poisoning himself and freezing to death. If he is still here tomorrow, then send him away.”

(Klaus, ever curious - ever defiant - in the face of his father, moves from his hiding place, hovering in the shadows behind his mother, and creeps back into his room.)

It’s the same every time.

Klaus fights back tears as he fills a backpack with supplies: some food, a few bottles of water, one of Diego’s old hoodies. He sneaks into the attic, finds something shiny and gold and packs it away with the intention of pawning it.

He leaves, more often than not, in the dead of the night, knowing it infuriates his siblings and devastates his mom.

It is better for everyone, he reasons, if he just disappears.

* * *

 

There begins a sort of ritual, every time he leaves. It’s accidental, at first.

It begins this way:

A boy packs his bag with the intention of leaving once again. He walks into the nearest bathroom, washes his face in the sink with cold water. He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror and runs his hands along his skin. His hands stop when they reach his cheeks as he buries his nails into his pale skin. He stands back after a moment, his hands falling to the sides, as he takes a deep breath and inspects the red indents appearing on his skin. He stares at himself until the red fades away.

It finishes this way:

The boy leaves the house via a bedroom window or a back door. On his way out, he sits on the ground in his garden. He lies back - more often than not in the snow that covers the ground - look up at the moon and then he disappears.

* * *

 

He first completed this ritual aged ten. A ten-year-old Klaus sees his first ghost and screams until his mother comes running to hold him in her arms. He’s small and terrified and sobbing as he tells her about the man with no eyes and blood gushing from his neck.

His father pulls him out of his mother’s arms and there’s a short moment where Klaus thinks he’s going to help him, explain what’s going on. Instead, he pushes his son into a car and drives the shaking child to a mausoleum.

His father begins to ask “What can you see?” but Klaus is already screaming, backing himself into a corner.

“This must be your power,” his father says simply, “you can communicate with the dead.”

“I don’t want this!” Klaus begs, “take it away!”

His father scoffs at him. He leaves.

He is locked in there for ten hours. By the time his father returns, Klaus can no longer speak. There are angry red scratches littering his arms and his stomach. He’s bruised and tired from throwing himself against the door. He’s rocking back and forth in fear.

His father picks him up, puts him in the car and drives him home. As soon as he opens the door to the house, Klaus runs past him, past Pogo, past Grace, past his siblings, and into his bedroom. He throws some clothes into a bag and runs straight out of the front door and out into a city that he doesn’t know.

His father doesn’t come after him, doesn’t allow anyone to go after him either.

He spends his days walking around the city, stealing food from shops and avoiding well-wishing people in the street who ask if he’s okay. He’s wild-eyed, shaking, alone and only ten years old and people stare at him as he walks past them. He’s not sure who’s dead and who’s alive and every so often he hears his name being called by someone who has died in a horrific way. He sleeps in a bus shelter at night and is amazed when he wakes up alive in the mornings.

Luther finds him eventually. His father finally sends Number One after him a week after he ran away and for a moment Klaus considers fighting him off, running away again. But his brother finds him just as it’s beginning to snow and he hands Klaus a packet of his favourite sweets that he bought from a shop down the road. Klaus is tired and cold and terrified so he takes the sweets gratefully and lets Luther pick him up and carry him home.

When he steps through the front door and feels the solid, reliable figure of Luther move away from him, Klaus walks to the nearest bathroom. He doesn’t say a word to anyone, just opens the door and locks it behind him.

This is where the ritual begins. He buries his nails into his skin to see if his face is still his, or if it belongs to one of the spirits that have begun to haunt him.

He cannot feel a thing.

He thinks suddenly, bitterly of his siblings. Luther who is their father’s favourite, who is just _strong_ . Diego who doesn’t need to breathe and can throw knives. Allison who can change reality. Five who can jump through space. Ben who hasn’t discovered his yet and Vanya who is _powerless._

They don’t understand. They stare at him like an animal in a zoo, unable to understand the confusion and sheer fear that his power brings.

Klaus doesn’t sleep on his first night back home. He just goes out into the garden, lies in the snow and tries to shut the ever-growing voices out.

The snow is heavy this year and Klaus is small, oh so small. He sinks heavily into it when he lies down and his tears threaten to freeze long before they leave his eyes.

Ben watches from the window, unsure of how he can help. He resigns to taking two sleeping bags from the attic, carrying them under his arm and out into the garden. He lays them both out next to each other on top of the snow as Klaus watches through tear filled eyes.

Ben climbs into one of the sleeping bags, gestures for Klaus to use the other one.

“You’re gonna freeze to death,” he says. Klaus just shrugs.

Klaus still doesn’t sleep, but he feels safer with his brother next to him.

* * *

 

The next time he runs away he is twelve. He has just begun training to utilize his powers.

He _hates_ it.

He feels resentment building in his chest every time he has to wear the stupid leather uniform, every time he has to learn to punch, every time he has to try and talk to the dead who refuse to listen to him.

His father spends twenty minutes shouting at the six powered siblings for not training hard enough. When he leaves the room, Allison is crying and Five is clenching his fists in anger.

Klaus hates seeing his siblings like this - stressed and frustrated, at each other's throats.

So, he thinks logically. He steals Grace’s heels and parades around in them until they laugh.

Well, five out of six of them laugh. Five just tells him to stop because he’ll hurt himself.

Klaus says “Yeah, with any luck,” and immediately regrets it when he falls down the stairs and breaks his jaw.

The doctor at the hospital has bright blue eyes and Klaus is kinda mesmerized by them. Perhaps it's because he's high on pain meds or perhaps it's because he finds the doctor attractive, but Klaus cannot take his eyes off him.

He barely hears the doctor say “wired shut” and “six weeks” and “intense drug therapy” as his mother looks on in concern.

He’s wired up and handed a box of drugs on his way out. He's told to take one a day. He takes them and realizes that the voices and the pain and the ghosts go away for a little while when he does. He can’t really open his mouth so he gets used to letting them dissolve against his gums. He gets used to the bad taste after a few days. He steals an extra box of medicine from the first aid cupboard, starts occasionally taking two or three a day.

(He's sure Vanya caught him one time but she hasn't mentioned it.)

Klaus, infamously loud-mouthed with an answer to everything, physically cannot speak. He cannot express his fear when his powers overwhelm him. He cannot gossip with Allison or argue with Luther. He’s prescribed a liquid diet and watches his siblings eat the meals their mother lovingly makes for them.

If he felt disconnected from his siblings before, he feels straight up isolated now.

When his jaw is better, he crams the boxes of tablets he’s got left over into his pockets and runs away from home to avoid going back on missions.

He stands on the edge of a bridge and throws the boxes into the sea.

“I am not an addict,” he reasons, but his shaking hands and voices coming back in his head tell him otherwise.

He’s two years older than he was the last time he ran away; he survives three weeks before it snows and he meekly returns home.

The snow has turned to ice this year. He creeps slowly down roads and across junctions for fear of falling and breaking something else. If it happened again, he’s not sure he’d be able to resist the temptation of a neat row of pills aid out in front of him, promising to take away his powers.

He stands at the gates of the academy, looks up at the sign labelling his old home. He walks around the back and out into the garden and falls asleep on the ice covering the grass for an hour before anyone even realizes he’s home.

Ben looks out the window and spots the figure of his brother lying in the snow. Ben thinks of his newfound power - the uncontrollable panic that transforming brings him every time he uses it. Ben realizes that he understands the torment that Klaus feels more than ever, more than any of their other siblings. He runs to tell their mother that his brother has returned home. She tiptoes out into the garden, bends down to pick up the sleeping boy and carries him inside. He’s still the smallest of all the siblings - not yet hit the growth spurt that’ll make him too long for his limbs - so she carries him with ease.

“I’m glad you’re home, Klaus,” she says quietly as she places him in his bed.

“I didn’t want to come back,” he says, starting to stir.

She shushes him.

“Just sleep now, you’ll feel better in the morning.”

(She wishes she could promise him that but she has no idea what the future holds for her son.)

He waits until his mother has gone to creep into the bathroom. He opens his mouth, turns his head as he inspects his skin. He runs his fingertips over his face and along his gums to feel where the wires once were. His fingers touch his cheeks and he buries his nails into his skin instinctively, impulsively until they draw blood.

He feels a sudden, sharp burst of pain but nothing more.

* * *

 

He is thirteen when Five disappears.

There is nothing out of the ordinary that suggests the day will be any different from the other days they’ve spent at the academy together.

He’s rolled a joint by the time the clock ticked six am. Five catches him leaning out of the window, lighting it and inhaling the smoke into his lungs.

“Seriously, Four? We haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

“Not today, man,” Klaus says, waving an arm vaguely towards him, “I’m too tired to argue with you.”

“Because you were high last night too!”

“Can’t hear you.”

“You’re a junkie, Four.”

Klaus turns to face him for the first time. Looks him in the eye and laughs.

“Fuck you, man.”

He swears that if he had known that Five would disappear two hours later, he wouldn’t have said that. Had he known, he would have agreed, sighed. He would have done anything he could have to make his brother stay.

As it is, Klaus didn’t know and he has to add this to his growing list of regrets. He decides that ‘fuck you’ cannot be the last thing that he said to Five so, when he’s has been missing for six days, he packs a bag and leaves the academy.

He realizes that he cannot see Five’s ghost so he must still be alive. He writes a list of all the places Five frequented, all the places he explored. Klaus wanders through alleyways and into shady parts of town filled with teenagers who offer to sell him drugs. He visits all the libraries in the furthest edge of the radius surrounding their house but he doesn’t find him.

Klaus survives a week, sleeping in motels with money he stole before he left and ducking into doorways when the money threatens to run out.

He’s sure he can survive forever until he accidentally passes too close to a graveyard and is overwhelmed by the screams of anguish that pour out from the ground. The screams flood from the coffins and into his brain, threatening to sweep him up into the waves and out into the sea. The ghosts that are tethered to this place - unable to move on to Heaven or Hell or wherever they go once their life has ended - rush towards him, recognizing he is not of their realm but not part of his own either.

Klaus cannot breathe. He runs as fast as he can to the nearest dealer, buys as much ketamine as he can with the remaining money he stole from his father’s office. He swallows some of the pills and collapses on the curb. He’s deposited back on the doorstep of the academy by a police officer.

He wakes and finds himself in his bedroom. Five has still not returned.

Klaus walks into the bathroom, buries his nails into his skin and looks at himself in the mirror in fear. His face is numb and his hand shakes when he thinks about the drugs in his pocket.

He can’t feel anything and it’s a refreshing change of pace.

He sighs, digs into his pocket and looks at the baggie he hid in there. There are six pills left, staring accusingly at him. He checks the bathroom door’s locked before grabbing a glass from the cupboard, filling it with water and swallowing one of the pills.

He rolls his neck, stretches his arms above his head as the pills take effect.

He strolls downstairs with a new found curiosity surrounding his home. He raises his arms, runs his hands along the engraved wooden walls and the frames lining the hallway.

Pogo stands at the end of the hall, watching.

“Are you quite alright, Number Four?”

Klaus looks up, finally notices the figure watching him. It takes him a few seconds to register who Pogo is. He stares at him for a second, attempting to work out why a monkey is talking to him.

“Pogo!” he says, after a moment.

“Master Klaus, have you taken anything… dubious?”

Klaus’s eyes widen in mock horror.

He lets out a _“No!”_ and quickly walks past Pogo and out into the garden.

The snow is light this year. It barely covers the ground and when he lies on the grass, he feels rocks against his back.

His father doesn’t acknowledge he was ever missing in the first place so he places another pill lightly on his tongue and listens to it dissolve.

(Four just misses Five.)

* * *

 

Klaus is fifteen the first time he overdoses on pills he stole from his mother’s first aid kit.

And everything goes to shit.

He pulls the first aid kit from the cupboard and neatly takes each of the pills from their casing. He finds twenty-two in total and lays them on the edge of the bath. He climbs into the bath and debates whether to fill it with water.

(He decides against it, reasoning that drowning is worse than overdosing.)

He falls into unconsciousness after the eleventh pill.

His brother, Diego, finds him, curled up in a ball in the bath, and when he feels Diego shaking him awake and yelling for help, Klaus knows he would feel guilty if he could feel anything at all.

The next thing he is aware of is that his father is shouting at him, demanding he tells him why he’s poisoning his body while they wait for an ambulance.

Klaus just shrugs, in his massively clouded state, he asks if Diego’s okay.

His father doesn’t tell him. Instead, he tells him that he should choose death or drugs and that he should choose quickly so as to make it easier for everyone else.

Klaus just laughs.

* * *

 

He spends four days in the hospital and he has no memory of being shocked back to life but he’s told that it happened twice.

His father forbids anyone from visiting him. He sits, alone, in a clinically empty room with nurses who ask him how he’s feeling and doctors who won’t let him have anything sharp.

And they definitely won’t let him keep his razor.

“I need to shave my face,” Klaus says on the second day.

The nurse looking after him smiles, almost pityingly, and shakes her head.

“We need to make sure you’re safe, sweetie.”

“Are you worried I’m going to hurt myself?” he asks.

She nods.

“You’re at risk,” she says slowly, “we need to keep an eye on you for a few weeks, discuss how we can help you.”

Klaus starts to panic. He can’t be in a hospital for weeks - a place where people go to _die,_ a place filled with ghosts.

“I can’t be here a few weeks. I wasn't trying to kill myself. You have to believe me.”

The nurse smiles. She leaves the room.

(Klaus waits until one of the nurses forgets to lock the door, grabs his bag from the open locker outside and runs out of the children’s ward. He hides around the corner and pulls on his jeans and shirt, drops the gown to the floor and disappears.)

* * *

He visits his dealer nearby, considers the irony of him being located so close to the hospital. He buys just enough drugs for the day and swallows them all gratefully.

He finds himself on the front door of a rehabilitation centre an hour later with no memory of ever getting there but he decides he has to go - if only to use it as somewhere to hide for a while.

He enters, pulls out a fake ID he had made a year before and slides it across the desk.

‘Nathan Coster,’ aged eighteen, checks into rehab. His few remaining possessions are tucked away. His shoelaces are removed and he’s handed a hospital band to lace around his wrist.

He’s fine for the first three days. He moves through the corridors with ease, nodding to other addicts.

 _This will be easy,_ he thinks.

His powers return with full force on the fourth day. He wakes up screaming and realizes his room is no longer empty. It’s filled with spirits that tear at their clothes and scream his name. His skin starts to burn and he’s sure he’s on fire and he’s angry and terrified and he can’t explain that he sees ghosts without being sent to a very different hospital.

Without the drugs to stop them, the ghosts and spirits and phantoms and spectres scream at him with all the power they can muster. They shout for help and he’s forced to hear their sobs, their pain, their fears, their regrets.

The workers watch him in alarm, their suspicions that he is not who he says he is growing exponentially.

He begs for his mom, for Diego, for Ben, for Five, but no one comes.

* * *

 

He's released six months later. They hand him his belongings and pretend not to notice how thin and pale the boy has become.

He steps out into the cold snow and considers his options. He pulls his jacket tighter around himself and thinks of the places he could go. He knows it’s safest to go home, to be far away from his dealers. He catches a bus back to the academy - slides through the doors before the driver notices he hasn't paid.

He stands on his front doorstep when he arrives home. He pulls his key from his pocket and tries to open the door. It won’t turn.

He presses the doorbell, knocks his fist against the door twice more. No one comes.

“Hey!” he says through the letterbox, “anyone home?”

“Oh, you’re alive,” a voice says from above his head.

“Hey sis,” he says, waving to Allison who is leaning out the window in the room above him, “missed you.”

“Did you? Because we thought you were dead and you haven’t been home in six months.”

“Can you just let me in? My key isn't working.”

“Dad changed the locks.”

“What the fuck?”

“Language. Pogo will hear you.”

“How old are you? Six? Just let me in.”

“Dad said if you came around, we shouldn’t let you in. Because you left.”

Klaus curses the day he was ever born and lets out an audible groan.

“I’ve been in rehab,” he says quietly.

“What?”

“I checked myself into rehab. That’s why I haven’t been home.”

“Don’t you need a parent’s-”

“Fake ID,” he says simply, “can I come in now?”

Allison nods. She appears in the doorway as it opens. She studies him for a moment, notes the way his skin has turned almost translucent and he shakes in the cold.

“Are you gonna tell dad?” she asks.

“The last time we discussed my drug habits, our dear old dad told me it would be better for me to be dead than to poison myself. So, no. I’m not telling anyone.”

She looks at him in concern, wraps her arm around his as they walk up the stairs.

“What about your powers?”

“They’re back,” he says weakly, “not sure what I’m going to do about that.”

There’s a moments silence as they walk.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

He sighs.

“I know.”

He breaks away from her hold and heads towards the bathroom.

He feels the familiar disassociating feeling take over as he steps into the bathroom.

He pulls off his coat, drops it lightly to the floor. He stands in front of the mirror and buries his nails into the skin of his face to see if he’s still human.

He's not human, he thinks. He’s standing three feet away from his body, staring at skin and hair and bones that aren’t his.

His nails dig into his skin and he feels the distant, numb pain that it brings. His hands drop to his sides and twitch uncomfortably and he watches himself subconsciously reach into the cupboard where his mother stored the first aid kit. He finds the cupboard empty and snaps back into reality.

He’s not doing this anymore, he reminds himself, he doesn’t need them, he’s _fine._

He walks downstairs with the intention of finding something to eat.

His siblings are sitting around the table, they all fall silent as Klaus walks into the room as if the slightest noise could push him over the edge. Allison looks guilty. Luther refuses to look at him.

It makes Klaus feel sick.

Diego and Ben stand up as he enters, a vague attempt to look natural and normal in the presence of a situation that is very abstract to them.

He knows Allison must have told them.

Klaus can’t do this. He wants to tell dad. He wants him to be proud of him for making the effort but he knows he wouldn’t care.

He wants to sit down with his siblings. He wants to talk about his feelings and emotions and fears. He wants to show them that he wants to get better. He wants to explain how his powers make him want to die because they don’t understand, not really.

Instead, he says _“Oh, fuck this.”_

He remembers something the counsellor said about finding another way to ‘shock’ his brain with a high that isn’t really a high. He stares back at his siblings for a moment before walking out the room and into the garden.

On the way out he grabs his old black coat from where it hangs on the peg by the door.

He is thinner this year, he can’t remember the last time he ate anything properly. His body can’t cope with the cold as easy as it used to, so when he starts to cry and lies on the grass outside, he feels his skin crawl and his bones shiver against the ice beneath him.

He feels the voices returning to his head, the control he gained over them slipping as panic returns to his lungs. He sits up suddenly, desperately clawing at his coat pocket. He pulls at the lining so hard it rips, exposing the small sleeve of drugs he hid in there months earlier. He swallows one of them gratefully, lies back in the snow and realizes he can breathe for the first time in months.

What’s the point, he reasons, of being sober if everyone still thinks he’s a junkie?

It’s not the ghosts that he needs relief from, he realizes, it’s his family.

(His mother watches with pained concern from the window but his father denies her the right of going to him.)

* * *

 

He lives like that for a while - sneaking drugs in and out the house, dipping between sobriety and the relief that a high brings. When he runs out of drugs he sneaks into his father’s office and steals alcohol from the cupboard above his desk. He’s sure his father knows but he does nothing to stop him.

Nobody can stop him, Klaus thinks, either he’ll die or he’ll just carry on forever, living this way.

His life continues. He goes through the motions: drugs, missions, sleeping.

He’s sent out on a simple mission one day and, in the absence of any useful powers, Klaus is designated the role of lookout. One’s leading - of course - with Ben in the front position. Diego is backup. Allison is damage control.

They’re fighting in a bank somewhere. Klaus can’t even really remember what they were fighting for or who they were fighting. All he knows is that he’s learnt to make shapes with the smoke he exhales and it keeps him amused for the time being.

Klaus stands by the vault, smoking a joint as he listens to the vague fight noises coming from the main room. He hears Luther shouting orders - that’s nothing new. He hears Allison using her power. He hears Diego laughing and the shout of pain from whoever he’s just stabbed.

He abruptly realizes with alarm that he can’t hear Ben. He usually hears his protests or orders or action plans or something, _anything_.

Klaus feels the hair on his arms stand on end. He feels the dull headache that comes when his powers begin to work and takes another drawl of smoke into his lungs, feels the headache disappear.

His powers don’t work properly anyway, he reasons, he’s suppressed them for so long that he doesn’t even know the full extent of his powers anyway so he’s almost certain that jolt of alertness he just felt means nothing.

Klaus is distantly aware that Allison is screaming his name. It takes a moment but he finally realizes he's needed and steps into the large hall where his siblings are fighting.

A sixteen-year-old Klaus finds his brother’s body.

He screams for Ben to wake up, to stay with him, to _just fucking breathe_ because he can’t do this without him. He leans over him, clutching him by the collar, watching the blood from his wound grow and spread across his clothes. He attempts to put pressure on the wound but he knows he’s too late.

He promises Ben that if he wakes up, he'll stop taking drugs, he'll stop drinking, he'll never run away again - but his brother remains still and lifeless on the ground, immune to his pleas.

Klaus Hargreeves, having already lost one brother, suddenly loses another.

Klaus stumbles away, shouts for Luther to help, to do _something,_ but he ignores him, carries on fighting. He hears the vague sound of an ambulance’s siren and Diego crying but Klaus doesn’t stop, he just runs out the door to throw up. He starts running and doesn’t stop until he collapses on the other side of town.

He can’t go back to the academy, not yet.

He finds a nearby hotel, books a room for a week. The receptionist regards him with a look of horror as he walks up to her and Klaus realises he’s still covered in Ben’s blood.

“Fancy dress party,” he says weakly. The woman lets out a sigh of relief.

He takes his hotel key gratefully, walks to his room and closes the door behind him. He falls to the floor with his back to the door. He doesn’t cry, he doesn’t scream. He’s just _numb._

* * *

 

The funeral takes place two weeks later. Klaus walks into the academy in a new pair of black jeans and a smart shirt and jacket he’d bought especially for it.

He’s run out of drugs but the need to buy them hasn’t struck him yet. Grief triumphs over his powers and he can think of nothing else other than the guilt and loss he is feeling.

Allison embraces him as soon as he walks through the door and he slumps into her hug.

Luther appears in the doorway, suitably subdued for the day, watches them for a while.

“You need to wear a tie,” he says.

Allison glares at him. Klaus is too tired to fight with his brother today. He just nods.

Klaus walks upstairs, leaves Allison and Luther to argue behind him.

(The cracks in their relationship are beginning to show. Luther is tired of the indecision. Allison is just tired of him.)

“He’s grieving,” Allison is saying.

“Aren’t we all!” Luther says, “I still remembered to wear a tie.”

Klaus moves out of earshot and into Ben’s room. He rummages through Ben’s wardrobe, finds his brother’s old academy tie - blue and red, untouched for almost two years.

Klaus thinks it’s appropriate and suitably morbid so he ties it neatly around his neck.

He retreats to the bathroom nearby and stares at his face in the mirror. It’s unfamiliar to him, his hair’s neatly pushed back, he’s wearing clothes he doesn’t recognise. He buries his nails suddenly into his skin in grief and watches as spots of blood intertwine with the tears threatening to fall down his cheeks. He wipes his eyes suddenly. He thinks he hears Ben’s voice but his brain is filled with cloud and sadness and he cannot remember anything else except his brother’s cold, dead eyes staring into his and the blood dripping from the wound on his chest.

A bell rings from somewhere in the house. Klaus composes himself and follows it.

His siblings stand neatly at the front of the room, mourning the loss of yet another Hargreeves brother. There’s four of them - Luther, Allison, Diego and Vanya - all in a row next to their parents, looking down into the coffin that holds their brother. Vanya looks over at Klaus expectantly but he remains at the back of the room, alone.

(There’s this unspoken knowledge amongst the siblings that Klaus loved Ben most.)

Klaus ran out of drugs two weeks before but he realises he doesn’t care. He can barely hear Luther giving his speech over the sound of the ghosts screaming at him. He sees them, feels their pain and their sorrows, and lets it wash over him like a tidal wave because maybe, he reasons, he deserves it.

He looks to his left and thinks he sees Ben disappear into the garden and he laughs because he’s sure he’s gone crazy. His siblings all turn to look at him with a mixture of either scorn or concern.

He can’t do this, Klaus realises. He can’t. He turns and leaves, makes his way to Ben’s old bedroom. He lets himself in, locks the door behind him with a gentle _click._ He sits with his back to the door and for the first time since his brother’s death, he lets himself cry - _properly_ cry. He’s not sure for how long, all he knows is that sobs wrack his body and he can’t see past the tears flooding from his eyes. His brother’s room is cold. The photos lining the walls stare accusingly at him while the book cases wait for him to explain why he didn’t save their owner.

Their voices get louder and louder, interweaving with those of the spirits around him.

One voice is heard over the others.

Diego stands on the other side of the door, knocking hesitantly.

Everything goes silent in Klaus’s head.

“Diego?” he asks.

“Yeah, bro, it’s me. Are you okay?”

“Not really.”

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“I’m just outside, okay. I’m- I’m here if you need me,” Diego’s voice falters.

“Thanks, Dee,” Klaus says quietly.

He stands up, considers opening the door and letting Diego in. He’s almost tempted, but he chooses instead to climb haphazardly out of Ben’s window and to walk out into the garden. He lies in the snow, piles it over his legs and arms and chest and covers his face but he feels nothing at all until he passes out.

The last thing he sees is Ben lying next to him but he’s sure he’s just hallucinating.

* * *

 

He doesn’t know it but he won’t return to this house for fourteen years.

When he does finally return, he is a little taller, a little sadder - a thirty-year-old man with an almost impressive collection of traumas and an affiliation with drugs deeply entrenched in his muscle memory. He’s covered his skin with tattoos over the years, most of which he has no memory of ever getting. He holds himself slightly better, takes slightly more care of the curls in his hair, the black nail polish he wears, the clothes lining his back.

(He’s still lost - but he’s _tired_ of being lost.)

He returns to his house for the first time in almost a decade after learning of his father’s untimely death.

He wishes he could remember more about the house. He stands in the pathway, looking up at the sign labelled _‘The Umbrella Academy’_ and wishes he could remember more than just pain and suffering and overdoses and funerals.

The front door is unlocked and he considers for a moment just walking away. He was staying with a man he met in rehab and he considers just turning around, asking him to let him stay longer and just going back to bed.

There’s a growing number of paparazzi and reporters driving up and down the road, waiting for a glimpse of one of the five remaining Hargreeves children - hopefully the famous sister or the junkie brother.

Klaus has spent his whole life being stared at by people who don’t understand so he walks inside.

Little has changed.

The walls are still lined with dark oak wood. The floor is still scratched from fights and training and Diego’s many knives. Thedesperately creepy diagrams in frames are still hung along the hallway labelling moves like _‘kick,’ ‘punch,’ ‘kill’_ and Klaus immediately remembers why he hated this place so much. He can’t even begin to understand why Luther chose to stay.

He makes his way to his father’s office. It’s remained locked since his death - opening only to the key that Pogo has or the copy Klaus made years prior. That key allowed him the luxury of the alcohol his father kept hidden and the matches he locked away in a drawer. His father realised that even at a young age Klaus presented arson-related tendencies and decided certain measures must be taken to stop him.

(He used to light fires in his bedroom as a teenager when he’d hear his mother walking down the hall, if only to gain her attention for a little while as she put it out and checked he was okay.)

Klaus thinks of this now as his fingers dance dangerously along the edge of the matchbox. He pulls one out, lights it suddenly, watches the fire burn its way along the wood. He holds his hand over the top of the flame, feels the flames lick at his palm.

He hears footsteps and quickly blows the match out, drops it to the floor and crushes it beneath his foot.

“Whatcha doing, Klaus?” Allison asks, appearing in the doorway.

“Allison! Wow, is that you? Long time.”

“Too long,” she agrees. She wraps her arms around him in a hug and he’s oddly struck by how young it makes him feel.

“Just out of rehab?” she asks, noticing his hospital band.

Klaus, forever too proud to admit he needs help, shakes his head.

“No, no. I'm done with all that,” he sighs, “just came down here to prove to myself that the old man was really gone. And he is! He's dead.”

Allison laughs. He realises he’s missed this; he’s missed _her._

“You know how I know? Because if he were alive, not one of us would be allowed to set foot in this room. He was always in here, our whole childhood, plotting his next torment, right? Remember how he used to look at us? That scowl? Thank Christ he's not our real father so we couldn't inherit those cold, dead eyes!”

Allison opens her mouth to reply but Luther coughs from the doorway. Klaus realises he has not missed him.

(Also… his brother is now _huge._ That’s new.)

Klaus ever-grateful for a distraction, pockets the items from the desk and slips past his brother and back into the house.

* * *

 

He passes through the kitchen and notes how it still smells faintly like bleach and the pancakes his mother always used to make.

He shakes his head of old memories, walks up the long staircase, comes to stand at the top and looks down the hallway that hides each of their own rooms.

All the odd numbered children occupied the left side of the corridor. The closest room was always Five’s but Klaus can’t bring himself to look inside. Vanya’s was next, sandwiched between Five and Three. He knows it’ll be empty, she took all the furniture and items and sold them to get her own place years ago. Allison’s was next door - it shared a wall with Luther’s. Klaus vaguely remembers them talking through the wall to each other, unaware that the others could hear.

Luther’s the only sibling who still lives at home.

(Klaus considers looking into Luther’s room but he decides against it.)

The ‘even’ children’s rooms occupied the right side of the corridor. Diego’s was opposite Luther’s and Klaus is almost certain that his father did that to fuel their feuds and competition.

Klaus’s own room was next. He never really minded it that much, he liked being between Diego and Ben because when it all got too much, he knew one of them would be near to help. His hand rests on the handle but he doesn’t open it.

He impulsively moves into Ben’s room instead. It remains frozen in time - an eternal shrine to the sixteen year old they lost.

“Hey, Ben,” he says as he walks in and shuts the door behind him.

Ben - or rather, Ben’s ghost - is sitting on the windowsill, watching the people go past.

“You’ve sobered up a bit,” Ben says, looking down at himself, “we can actually talk.”

(They learnt long ago that Ben was spiritually tethered to Klaus - although the rope tying them together fades and strengthens depending on Klaus’s sobriety. Sometimes, it’s so weak he can barely see Ben - let alone talk to him.)

“I’ve only got a few pills left - ‘m rationing them,” Klaus says, casually.

“Is that why you’re here?”

Klaus shrugs.

“I don’t know. Tired of looking for somewhere to sleep.”

“Are you okay?” Ben asks.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. Why?”

“You’re back here. For a funeral. For the first time in, like, fifteen years. That’s rough.”

“It’s only been fourteen years, I’ll have you know.”

Ben rolls his eyes, turns his back to Klaus and continues looking out the window.

“Diego’s just got here,” he says looking down onto the street, “Allison’s car just pulled up too.”

Klaus scrambles over to look. He leans where Ben's knee is but his hand falls straight through and lands heavily on the windowsill. He curses slightly.

“Is Luther back yet?”

“Yeah, he’s downstairs,” Ben says.

“Any sign of Vanya?”

“I don't think she's gonna come, Klaus.”

Klaus sighs, stands up and stretches his hands above his head.

“You want me to come down with you?” Ben asks.

Klaus nods but he knows Ben hasn’t got anywhere else to go anyway.

* * *

 

They step out of Ben’s room and he hears his siblings pile into the house accompanied by varying arrays of noise. He hears Vanya’s voice. It’s oddly brave of her to come, he thinks.

If he knows them - and he does, he reminds himself, it doesn’t have to be scary because he _does_ know them - he knows that Luther and Diego will already be arguing, Allison and Vanya will be hugging, Pogo and mom will be watching with a mixture of pain and fondness.

He realises that apart from Ben, nobody even knows he's here yet. It's oddly peaceful in a way. He sighs heavily, reaches into his pocket and pulls out the bag of pills. He’s only got six left. He chokes down two of them.

Ben watches in a state of anger and distress but he doesn’t say anything. Their connection fades a little but strengthens as Ben stands closer to him.

“You can do this,” he says. Klaus nods.

He walks downstairs, makes his presence known and joins the procession of siblings in the funeral parade.

* * *

 

He sees his mother first. She’s standing in the kitchen, cooking. She doesn’t notice him straight away, so he stands and watches her for a moment.

She moves methodically and if Ben notices the way Klaus is staring intently at her, he doesn’t mention it.

She turns around eventually and there’s this jolt of panic when he realises, he looks older than she does. His mother, eternally cursed with the beauty and grace that their father programmed her with, notices too. She sees the lines littering his forehead, the stress making its home on his face. She pauses for a moment before she wraps her arms around him, holds him close. She smells faintly of metal and lavender and the perfume she always wore when they were young.

“You’ve gotten thin, Klaus,” she admonishes.

“Sorry, mom.”

“Have you eaten anything today?”

“No, mom.”

She steps back, sighs, holds him by the shoulders, scans her eyes over him like she’s trying to commit his face to memory. She raises a hand to his face, delicately runs her finger along his cheek. He flinches slightly, her fingers are cold.

“I haven’t seen you in so long,” she says, her hand lowering as she attempts to smile, “you were sixteen the last time you were here. I’ve missed you so much.”

“I know, mom, I’m sorry. I just- I couldn’t come back here.”

“You ran away so many times, I always knew that someday it would stick. I’m sorry that I never-”

“It wasn't your fault that I left, mom.”

She opens her mouth to say something but no words come out.

“I’m sorry about dad,” he says quietly, “this must be hard for you.”

“Your father was a great man,” she says mechanically. She's smiling but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

He nods. He cannot find the energy to argue with her, he's sure Luther will do that later anyway.

“You were a great mom,” he says honestly, “you still are.”

He looks past her and at Ben who’s standing sadly in the doorway. Ben nods.

“Ben always thought so too.”

“Well,” she says, almost sadly, “there’s a lot less mothering to do nowadays.”

“I don’t think One’s going to be leaving any time soon. And now Diego’s back you won’t be able to pry him off you,” Klaus smiles.

“Don’t be mean to your brother,” his mother says but there’s no anger behind her words, “I’ll be glad to have Diego back for a little while.”

Klaus nods.

“I’m gonna go see the others,” he says.

“Okay, sweetheart,” his mother says, resuming her cooking, “stay for dinner tonight?”

He nods but he doesn’t make any promises.

* * *

 

He feels tired and scared but, unlike all the years prior, he won’t leave immediately.

He can’t bring himself to leave. Maybe it’s because he’s achingly broke. Maybe it’s because he’s down to his last four pills. Maybe it’s because he needs money to buy ketamine.

On the other hand, maybe it’s because he feels the energy crackling in the air around their heads. He can sense the chaotic atmosphere waiting to erupt. He wonders if his siblings can feel it too - this difference in the air.

For one thing, their father is dead. Klaus realises he feels a wave of relief washing over his shoulders as he walks away from his mom and into the living room.

He has just enough pills in his pocket to last him the day and to subdue his powers to stop him conjuring the man and his cold, dead eyes.

He feels his breath quicken as he makes his way into the room.

“Stop thinking about him,” Ben says knowingly, “he’s dead.”

* * *

 

It’s different in other ways.

Five is back, for one thing.

Upon his return, there’s seven siblings - six alive, one dead - all standing neatly in a row celebrating their father's death and their brothers return.

It’s been almost two decades since they all stood next to each other like this and they don’t even know that Ben’s there.

* * *

 

Klaus sits on the dining room table as Five talks to them and he’s only half listening to the nonsense that’s spilling from the thirteen-year-old’s mouth. Instead, he’s thinking intently about each of his siblings.

Luther is much taller and much larger but he is still Luther. He still stares at Allison with an expression that the others can’t quite put their finger on. He still takes control and labels himself Number One and defends his father despite everything he did.

(It is easy, Klaus thinks, to defend their father’s actions when you were always his favourite.)

Luther still looks disdainfully at Klaus like he’s not good enough to be in his presence. He still asks him if he’s high as soon as he opens his mouth and Klaus relishes the look on his face when he says “My dearest brother, I haven’t been fully sober in almost twenty years.”

It's a shame, really. When they were ten, Luther found his brother sleeping in a bus shelter and specifically bought him his favourite sweets to cheer him up before carrying him home.

When they were thirteen, Luther would warn Klaus when their father was coming upstairs just in time for Klaus to put his cigarette out and jump into bed to avoid being punished.

When they were sixteen - before Ben's death, before Klaus left and Luther stayed - they would drink bottles of Coke that Klaus stole from the shop down the road and sit on the roof and look at the moon.

Klaus sighs whenever he looks at Luther for too long.

* * *

 

Diego is angrier, Klaus realises.

He’s still dark and witty and scathing but there’s something decidedly unfamiliar about the way his fingers dance along the waist of his belt and dart in and out amongst the knives as if he may find reason to use one at any second. There’s this new edge of unpredictable danger about him.

He still glares at Luther behind his back and his fists still clench whenever Vanya walks past - Klaus knows her book hurt him in a way that she may never be able to fix. The world knows he stutters when he’s emotional and follows after his mom for support and dances when he thinks no one can see him and that is harder for Diego to come to terms with than any knife wound.

Klaus thinks of his conversation with Diego that morning.

When he saw Diego for the first time in over a decade, Diego wrapped him in a hug and asked quietly “How have you been?”

Klaus says “You know, I’ve been better. But dad’s dead and that’s the best news in the world.”

Diego had smiled. Klaus has missed him.

 

Allison is older. Well, she’s the same age as him but she’s older - in mind, in spirit, in life experience. She has a child now.

(Klaus can’t quite understand that. He thinks of him bringing a child into the world and it makes him sick to the stomach. A scrawny, addictive, destructive child with his curly hair and desperate need for attention. Would it inherit his powers? It doesn’t matter, he thinks, he’s not having one.)

He looks at Allison and sees everything he wants - stability, a power she can control, that bright red skirt she’s wearing right now that he’s considering stealing. He wonders how much of it came about via hard work and how much came about via her powers.

He thinks back to how she was as a child, how they used to gossip together. He shakes his head, reminds himself those times have long passed.

* * *

 

Five is back, that’s new.

Klaus had to check that the others could see him when he appeared in the garden, for fear that he was just high and hallucinating the thirteen-year-old Five.

(Or - _worse_ \- that he was seeing Five’s ghost and that he did truly die all that time ago when he disappeared.)

Klaus surmised that he hadn’t gone crazy, that the others can see the boy too.

Five is somehow thirteen and fifty-eight at the same time and Klaus can’t remember a single day in which he didn’t think about him in the years he’s been gone. He wants to apologise, wants to say “I’m so sorry that the last thing I said to you was ‘fuck you’” but Five only comments ‘nice dress’ so he thinks maybe he’s forgiven him.

Five still calls Klaus a ‘junkie,’ still smacks the drugs out of his hand when he catches him trying to take some. He’s still devastatingly pessimistic and sarcastic. He still eats peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches and drinks endless cups of coffee. He’s still the same paranoid genius who refused to take a real name when they were six.

But he’s changed like the rest of them. Klaus recognises the familiar tics of an addict when Five mumbles about the apocalypse, about impending doom. The constant need for coffee. His apparent inability to sleep.

Klaus wants to help, feels his ‘older brother’ instinct kick in but Luther accuses them all of murder and Five is shouting about the end of the world so there’s not really much time to ask if he’s okay.

* * *

 

Ben is the same, of course.

He’s eternally doomed to always be the same. He’s still sixteen, tall and pale and he longs to see the beach or see a movie or to talk to someone other than Klaus. He doesn’t breathe, doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep.

Klaus is sure that Ben used to smile when he was alive but he’s forgotten what that would look like. Ben stands at an arm’s length from Klaus at all times, whether Klaus sees him or not. Ben - strong, loyal, protective Ben - fights off ghosts the way he would fight off bad guys when he was alive, always to protect Klaus.

Klaus misses Ben the most even though he’s right there.

* * *

 

Klaus hasn’t seen Vanya for so long that he cannot remember what she was once like. Perhaps she was louder, quieter, smaller, bigger - he cannot be sure. When he sees her for the first time at the funeral, he cannot think of anything to say so he hugs her close. She’s always been small, he remembers.

He vaguely remembers her playing the violin. He has the odd memory of dancing around the house while she played.

“Do you still play?” he asks.

She nods, silently, and he remembers that perhaps she has always been reserved.

He thinks of her book, how her thoughts must have finally overfilled and spilled out into words against a page, allowing her to write a book of their family secrets.

He cannot find the heart to resent her because she always will be his little sister. He tells her as such and she looks confused.

“We’re the same age, Klaus,” she says, smiling slightly.

He shrugs.

“Me and Ben read your book,” he says.

She looks at him disconcerted for a moment until she understands.

“Say hello to Ben for me,” she says, “tell him I miss him.”

He nods, turns to look at Ben who smiles.

For someone without any powers, he thinks Vanya understands his the best out of all the siblings.

* * *

 

He waits until Five has stopped talking and his sibling’s conversation shifts away from him. He steps silently into the nearest bathroom and feels an unfamiliar sense of calmness fall over him. He raises his hands to his face and buries his nails into his skin momentarily as hard as he can.

He feels a sudden jolt of shock as blood falls from his skin. His hands drop to his sides.

He sighs.

It feels odd being back and it still feels odd being alive. He looks around the room, thinks of all those hours he spent in this room as a teenager.

He thinks of all the times he buried his nails into his skin and realises he lacks the urge to do it again.

Maybe that’s what growing up is, he thinks.

* * *

 

Another difference, Klaus realises, is that there is no snow.

He looks out of the window and into the garden. The grass is a dull green. It blows gently in the wind. There’s no snow or ice to hide it. He pulls the drugs out of his pocket and swallows the remaining ones.

The grass is vulnerable and open and scared and maybe Klaus is overthinking about it too much but he’s high and vulnerable and open and scared too.

Klaus realises he is suddenly standing in his old bedroom but he doesn’t remember how he got there. He looks around, sees the fairy lights and the drawings and writing on the wall. He sees the Ouija board he stole and the clothes discarded in a pile on the floor.

(Diego has appeared in the doorway behind him. He goes to speak but realises that Klaus hasn’t noticed him yet. Instead, he stays silent, watches his brother as he cautiously rediscovers his bedroom.)

He pulls back the headboard of his bed, sees the empty bottles of alcohol still hidden behind it. He pulls open the bedside drawer, flicks through the old developed photos of Ben and Diego and he smiles. He thinks of the camera, remembers how his father hid one in his room. He stands on his bed carefully, pushes at the ceiling tile in the corner of the room and sees the camera, still innocently hiding after all this time.

He pulls at it with all the force he can muster, feels the wires snap against his palm. It’s small enough to clutch in one hand. He closes his hand into a fist suddenly, feels it crack as it’s crushed into his skin. He throws it casually over his shoulder, hears it hit the ground.

(His father’s not here anymore, Klaus thinks, what is he going to be able to do about it?)

Nothing has been touched, nothing has been moved. He’s sure his mother has entered to dust every so often but otherwise it remains the same - a shrine of sorts to his desecrated, dysfunctional childhood.

He moves to the window, stares out.

“There’s no snow,” he whispers.

“What?” Diego asks, making his presence known.

Klaus turns around to look at Diego, finally realising he’s there. He feels the memories of being a child and standing with Diego in this exact way comes flooding back - every memory he’s tried to forget and drown out comes back.

Klaus realises he is tired. Just being in this house makes him tired.

Ben appears behind Diego and Klaus stares at him for a moment.

“Talk to him,” Ben says, nodding to Diego, “he always listened to you. He cared about you. Tell him how you’re feeling.”

“I can’t,” Klaus replies weakly.

“You can’t do what?” Diego asks, confused.

“I can’t- Look, there’s no snow. There’s always snow. I only ever come back when there’s snow.”

“We’re here for dad’s funeral, remember?” Diego says kindly.

Klaus remembers. He laughs.

“What have you taken?” Diego asks, stepping closer, “and what did you do to your face?”

Klaus raises a hand to his face, feels the indents of his nails in his skin, deeper than he ever knew them.

“I haven’t taken anything. I just - shit, this house, man. I can’t be here.”

Klaus pushes past Diego and walks through Ben, ignoring both of his brother’s looks of concern. He pushes open the back door and steps, barefoot, out onto the cool concrete. He can hear Ben calling his name but he ignores him. Klaus walks calmly around the corner and out into the garden.

He stumbles, sits down heavily on the grass. He lies down, feels his past versions of himself merging into one - memories and fears and hopes and dreams falling into each other, crashing against each other like ships in a storm heading towards destruction.

He thinks they’re like ghosts really. These ghosts of his past personalities and experiences and ages.

He runs his hands over his face, feels the faint scars of nails embedded into his skin building up every time he left the place that he once called his home.

He decides, in that moment, that he will leave soon. Immediately, if possible.

He’s seen Five. He’s seen Diego. He’s seen his mom. He’s said goodbye to his father. He’s filled a bag with things to pawn.

There’s nothing else keeping him here.

It is always winter when Klaus comes home.

(It’s always colder when Klaus leaves.)

 


End file.
